Ephemeral
by justadram
Summary: After the game, in Jon's car, he makes the most of the time he has left with Sansa. Jon/Sansa, modern au, part one of the Beans series.


**Summary**: After the game, in Jon's car, he makes the most of the time he has left with Sansa.

**Notes**: When pressed as to what I should title this Hot Coffee, Cold Rain prequel, all I could think of was The Dry Humping Fic and took to tumblr for suggestions. Followers suggested Grinding the Beans. There are only metaphorical beans getting ground in this fic, but I borrowed the idea for the series itself. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.

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Sansa's hand hovers close enough to his belt that Jon can think of nothing else, but his stomach is less fixated on the promise of what her touch might feel like. It gives loud protest, loud enough that she pulls back, her lips pink and wet from kissing, her cheeks flushed, and smiles, as her back pushes against the steering wheel of his car. She's amused and it's mortifying. Girls aren't supposed to be amused, when they're kneeling over you, making out in a darkened car.

"Why, hello," she says, glancing down at his stomach, as if to carry on a conversation with it.

There was no time before the football game to make himself something to eat, and unfortunately the constant feeling of being hungry hasn't abated since he turned fourteen and grew three inches in six months.

"Sorry about that."

She walks her fingers up the flat of his stomach, over his waffle knit pullover. "Come to dinner."

"What?"

"Come to dinner," she repeats more slowly, as if he's dumb and not just poor. She reaches up to smooth back her hair, which he's mussed with his eager hands, pulling it free of the high ponytail she sported at the game, the long silky strands swaying against her back as she bounced. "You've got time before work, don't you? Mama will have dinner almost ready. Stay."

He glances over her shoulder. The car's digital display reads 6:47. It's barely enough time, but that's not really the problem. "Your mother doesn't like me."

Sansa shrugs one shoulder, not bothering to disagree. "I'd rather you didn't go to work hungry." A little line forms between her brows, as she contemplates the possibility of him working a night shift with a growling stomach. "You'll be miserable."

That's the Sansa he loves. She can be thoughtless and self-centered, dragging him places he doesn't want to go to hang out with people who make him uncomfortable and ignoring him once they get there, but those moments are more about her age and not a reflection of her character. At least, he assumes that's the case, because otherwise why would she bother with him at all? He's got very little to offer her. If anything, he cramps her style.

All the other cheerleaders went out for pizza tonight after the Direwolves' big victory over the Lions with their varsity boyfriends, but she left with him, climbed into his embarrassingly beat up Ford, and gave up pizza and friends and post game gossip, because she knows he can't afford it. He could treat her to a glass of milk and a bowl of ramen, but that's about it, and yet, she's with him. Even if she refuses to call him her boyfriend, he is _someone_ to her, someone worth worrying about and giving things up for. At least for now.

But the Starks don't know he's someone. Anytime she's asked by anyone—family or friends—if they're dating, there's the standard response, _Jon? We're just friends_. Jon's fairly certain her friends don't buy it based on the teasing he silently endures, but the Starks haven't pushed the issue. Maybe they're not accustomed to their daughter lying. They'd be surprised. There's a lot of lying, a lot of sneaking around, a lot of making out in cars, and whispering, _Quiet, sweetheart_, as she writhes in his lap, making those little noises that get him hard. So far they haven't been caught. That doesn't mean her parents are thrilled with Sansa's 'friend.' Mr. Stark is friendly enough for now, but Mrs Stark always seems to watch him as if she's trying to figure out where it is he came from and how she might send him back.

She's not wrong to be annoyed. They've been fooling around behind her parents' backs for months, and he hates how it makes him feel in their presence, like he's every bit the bad influence she suspects him to be, but Sansa refuses to tell them the truth and he can't stop wanting to be with her. She's the girl he always wanted and never thought he could have. It's too tempting. So there's no real answer to it. Avoiding Sansa's house when Mr. and Mrs. Stark are awake is Jon's only defense against that gnawing feeling of guilt that makes him as twitchy and awkward as a twelve year old with his notebook clutched to his crotch. Dinner with the family isn't an option.

"I'll be okay. I'll get something from the vending machines at work."

Potato chips and a candy bar. A soda if he can dig up enough change in his console.

She huffs, and climbs off him, in an impossibly fluid display of agility, considering how long her legs are. He grasps at her arms, trying to halt her withdrawal, but he's not willing to hold tight enough to force her to stop, so it's a futile effort, and she flops back in the passenger seat with a blank glare, staring off through the windshield.

"You're being stubborn."

Maybe. But his dick's hard too, and it's painfully obvious now that she's sitting so far away, leaving him feeling incredibly stupid. Couldn't his stomach have shut up for another thirty minutes?

They've always moved at Sansa's pace. Since he's older and more experienced, he'd feel like the creep Mrs. Stark thinks he is if he ever suggested they try something, anything that didn't start as her suggestion. They've tried very little. Her friend Jeyne teasingly calls her, Everything But, but that's not accurate. By a long shot. It's too bad, because he'd like to have her discover things with him, things that make her feel good, and he's kind of good at some of the stuff that's not on the menu. Or at least he never had any complaints from Ygritte, his previous girlfriend, who taught him a thing or two before moving cross country.

Of course, what he and Sansa do is more than she did with any of her previous boyfriends, owing to the fact that she trusts him. That's what she always says. She trusts him not to be disrespectful. She's saving herself. Sometimes he isn't sure whether she means for marriage or just someone better than him. Either way, they're not having sex.

He's only really touched her twice, when her parents were out and they were alone and she told him to take her panties off. She was warm and wet and it's the stuff that fuels his morning sessions in the shower with one hand splayed against the white slick tile, while water runs over his face.

"I wish you didn't have to go to work. You're always either at work or at school," she says, crossing her arms over her grey and white cheer sweater. "It's like you don't want to have any fun with me."

What he wants to say that if she knew what it was like to have to pay for things, anything, she might understand that he wishes more than she ever could that he didn't have to go to work. It isn't that he works nights and attends the run down community college with outdated classrooms and worn out instructors during the day because he likes it. He'd much rather be like her friends, who within sixteen months will have thick college acceptances arriving in the mail and no worries about how they'll ever manage to pay for it. They won't even need the scholarships schools will throw at them. Sansa doesn't even pay for the gas in her pretty little sports car. There's a gap there he simply can't bridge.

But he doesn't like to be cross with her, because her parents have money and want to give her the world. There's nothing wrong with that. So what he says is, "You know I'd rather be with you," but that only makes her turn her head away, looking out the passenger window at the brick house they're parked in front of, four blocks away from her two-story McMansion, on a street where no one knows either of them, so no one will report back to Mrs. Stark that they saw a redheaded girl in a Winterfell High School sweater kissing some boy in a car with fogged up windows.

"Don't say things like that."

"Why?"

She lifts a finger to draw in the fading condensation on the window. "It's too nice."

He shakes his head, and turns to look out his own window. He's heard that one before—too nice—and it doesn't make any sense to him, because he thought that's what she liked best about him, what made her kiss him at that party Robb dragged him to, her lips tasting of rum and cherry Kool-Aid. He doesn't have any money, but he's nice, where Joffrey was cruel. He's kind. He's gentle. And yet, it seems to be what makes her hang back, keeping herself walled off behind giggles and pert smiles and hair flips.

"Don't be mad."

"I'm not."

He wishes he could be, that he could sustain some real anger towards her, but he can't, not when her voice is soft and uncertain and he just wants to tuck her—the one nice thing he has—into his chest and stroke her hair.

It's that pull that makes him look back only to see the heart she drew with its dripping point before she wipes it away with her palm. Maybe it was a message. Maybe not. She's a doodler. He's got a whole stack of notes saved in his bedside table that she's tucked into his pockets. They're full of her doodles, always addressed to him with his name spelled with a smiley face for the 'o.' He might be making more of them than she intended, squirreling them away to be reread, when he's feeling lonely. He might be making more of an ephemeral doodle on glass, when everything about them seems temporary. The thing about Jon is, the more it feels like he can't have something, the more he tries to push that idea to the back of his head, where it won't cause him any trouble, the more he wants it. And he wants her.

"How long do you have?" she asks, dragging her fingers through the ends of her hair, examining them for split ends with her lip caught between her teeth.

He checks the clock again. "About twenty-five minutes."

"I didn't want to spend our time together arguing."

"How'd you want to spend it?"

"Kissing." The blue of her eyes is electric, as they cut to him through her darkened lashes.

"Me?" he teases with a frown.

She rolls her eyes even as she climbs back over him until her bare thighs bracket his and the folds of her skirt spread over his lap. "Yes, you."

"Then I'll tell my stomach to keep quiet."

"Do."

Whatever time he has left before he heads into work, he intends on spending it kissing her if that's what she wants, so he palms the back of her head and brings her face down to his, letting her pepper his lips with feathery kisses until she tilts her head and pulls him in deeper. He kisses her with no thought of anything else, only the rub of their tongues and the bite of her teeth.

There's something tensely pleasurable about just kissing. It isn't that he doesn't want to have sex with her. He thinks about it more than he should, more than is probably healthy, and sometimes when her ass is in his lap and she's tugging on his hair with just her cotton panties and his jeans between them, he wants to say it. _Let me make love to you. Please_. He'd be so gentle with her. He would make it so good for her. It wouldn't be a first time she'd cringe about, looking back on it later. But he knows they're not going to, which makes kissing not an ends to a means, but the destination, and he could kiss her for hours.

They have kissed for hours, until her chin was pink from the scratch of his stubble. There was a night in the Stark's pool this summer, where he swears he was hard for hours, her slippery body under his hands, her little red gingham bikini just one pull away from coming undone, and their kisses, sweet, urgent kisses, underneath the starry sky. He knows what she tastes like after two hot cocoas at a football game, after she takes a stick of Juicy Fruit from his pack, after her favorite dessert, a lemon meringue cupcake, and after her teeth are freshly brushed with Crest. Jon suspects he'd be happy spending the rest of his life learning what she tastes like.

Shit, there are some really hot things he wouldn't mind showing her. The thought makes him twitch and he slides his hand lower into the small of her back, tugging her against the hard line in his jeans, easing the ache.

"Okay?" he asks against her lips, and her answer is a rock of her hips.

"Fuck." Normally he would apologize for swearing in her presence, because she doesn't really like it, but he's too sunk in the feel of her hips swaying into his, transferring the warmth of her to where he strains against his jeans. She smiles against his lips, pleased with herself, as his hand moves to cup her hip, his thumb pressing into the soft flesh where her sweater rises up and his fingers curling down over the rise of her ass. "This is more than kissing," he points out, as his fingers dig in, encouraging the slow undulation of her body.

She likes it slow. Whether his heel presses her over her clothing or his fingers circle her with her hand wrapped around his wrist, she wants it slow. He has to be patient with Sansa. She's eager enough, it's just her style, and he likes knowing that despite all her bubbly twittering, when they're alone, she's a different person completely under his touch.

She balances herself on his shoulders and rocks harder, her eyes fluttering closed at the drag of her body over his, angling until she hits the right spot. "You don't mind," she gasps.

"No, I don't," and to prove his point his hand urges her forward. "I like it. I'd like it even more if you came."

Her chest deflates, her breath leaving her in a rush, as her head settles on his shoulder. Even if he can't see it, he knows how rosy her cheeks must be, rosy with arousal and embarrassment and anticipation of something more, the more that keeps her restlessly rubbing against him. He nudges her collarbone, the part that peeks out from her sweater, with his nose, presses an open mouthed kiss there, and grazes her skin with his teeth. He kisses what he can reach, up her neck, under her ear, and then pulls her earlobe into his mouth, tugging, sucking, as their bodies move together in an imitation of what he wants so badly to do with her. He knows he can make her come.

She shivers in his grip, as he lets her earlobe slip free of his mouth and holds one hand firmly to her ass, cupping her, so he can rock up into her, the way he'd like to without this clothing between them. No condom, nothing. He could pull out in time, probably, he thinks, as her breathing grows shaky and her fingers twine in his shirt, stretching the fabric.

"Don't stop, okay?" she whispers, her mouth hot against his shoulder, and he lets his head flop back against the headrest and his mouth go slack, lost in the sensation of her body and her breath and her shaky voice. "Don't stop."

No, he totally wouldn't be able to pull out. That would be a terrible idea. "Fuck," he repeats, as her movements become more desperate, her body pressed against him in all the right places, her breasts rubbing against his chest, her back arched, her thighs tight around his hips.

And if he pulled aside her panties, the ones with the bow at the top, if he unzipped his pants, he could be inside of her. He could feel the tight pull of her body and watch himself disappear inside of her.

She hums, a wordless question, high and needy, and though his fingers flex against her hip and ass, close enough to his own orgasm that his balls are tightening and the muscles in his stomach twitch, he pulls himself together enough to form words. To tell her how beautiful she is. How lovely. How much he needs her. He calls her all the sappy endearments he usually only uses in his head, while he's watching her from a distance on the sidelines of the game or at a party or interacting with her little brothers. And he knows his murmured words have hit the mark when she comes. Her body stills and his name is on her lips, gasped and thin and desperate.

He'd let her come first just like this. Feel her tighten around him, let her ride it out, and then come inside of her with his arm wrapped under her body, holding her tight.

They have all their clothes on, he hasn't even slipped his hands under her bra, but his mind and the weight of her body supplies the rest. The pull of his orgasm in his gut snaps his head forward into her shoulder and his hips thrust erratically against her, once, twice. He groans, his eyes scrunching shut and his hands convulsively squeezing, as he pulses for what feels like forever.

He comes back to himself slowly, her fingers teasing through his dampened curls and her lips soft against his cheeks. But the buzzing elation and the sleepy contentedness that follows are as fleeting as the dripping heart on the window wiped away by her restless hand. Soon enough it's just the uncomfortable feeling of having come in his pants and her chewing on her lip, as her eyes drift downward.

"You probably have to go, don't you?"

He hates to run after this. Really. It feels wrong, cheap and childish, but he has to register for next semester's classes in the upcoming week and there will be books to buy and credits to pay off. Showing up late to work or not showing up at all, so he can cuddle with her in her parents' basement would be a terribly irresponsible decision, and unlike most people his age, he doesn't have the luxury of being irresponsible.

He runs his hand over his mouth. "Yeah, I'll have to run home first."

She wrinkles her nose. "Sorry."

"Hey," he says, cupping her chin. "Don't apologize for that. I love when we do that."

Her mouth twitches, a quick, uncertain smile. "Me too. It's like," she says, exhaling on a nervous huff, "kind of like we're actually…"

She trails off and he knows she won't say it. She can rarely vocalize these things. It doesn't fit with her image of herself, as the wholesome girl who's saving herself for something, a something that makes him a passing, temporary distraction. But she isn't wrong. In that moment, it's almost like they're actually having sex or at least on the verge of it. One roll of the hips, one really firm stroke, and they'd be there. It's only that the feeling is ephemeral. No staying power. Like everything else about them.

He kisses the tip of her nose, and he tries the lie out just to see how long it will take to fade, "One day, sweetheart."

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**Notes**: The series will be concluded with a third part, set after Hot Coffee, and yes, you might poke me about it on tumblr (justadram). A little encouragement never hurt.


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